Ever since The Dark Knight was infamously snubbed for a Best Picture nomination in 2009, comic book movies have slowly but surely made the case for more serious consideration from Oscar voters. Black Panther earned seven nominations last year, including one for Best Picture — the first comic book movie to do so. The Marvel film ultimately won three statues, but lost the big prize to Green Book. Now Joker, which had led this year’s Oscars race with 11 nominations, has also lost in the top category. So what went wrong for Joker in the Best Picture race?
“Despite its popularity, Joker was a dark, depressing film, and perhaps its tone is what turned off some voters,” said Erik Davis, managing editor of Fandango. Richard Rushfield, veteran entertainment journalist and writer of The Ankler newsletter, agreed that Joker’s unrelenting grimness probably hurt its Best Picture chances. “They’re not feel-good movies, but they’re not feel-bad movies either,” Rushfield said of the types of films that typically win Best Picture. “And Joker’s definitely a feel-bad movie.”
“Just for a superhero movie to get nominated, and certainly get best acting prizes, is pretty extraordinary. But for it to win, I think it’s farther than the Academy is willing to go,” Rushfield said.
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While “the industry applauds the success of Marvel and DC and other comic book movies,” IndieWire Editor-at-Large and Oscar pundit Anne Thompson observed, “they don’t give them as much artistic credit.” And as much of a landmark accomplishment as it was for Joker to score 11 Oscar nominations, Thompson believes “it’s still going to be a ways before [comic book movies] win more than technical nominations” and become viewed as artistic contributions to the medium in their own right. (Exhibit A: Oscar winner Martin Scorsese’s contentious observations that comic book movies aren’t “real cinema” so much as theme park attractions.)
All three industry observers IGN spoke to agreed that Joker won in the two races that best showcased its strengths. “Its score and Joaquin Phoenix performance were the real stand-outs of that film, and both were honored with Oscars,” said Davis, a sentiment shared by both Thompson and Rushfield. Indeed, Phoenix’s acclaimed performance remained a dominant discussion point about Joker throughout awards season, even as the film itself remained hotly debated. In addition to Phoenix’s Best Actor win Sunday night, composer Hildur Guðnadóttir also won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. These were the only two categories of Joker’s 11 nominations, including Best Picture, where the film triumphed.
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Phoenix’s unnerving portrayal of Joker places him in a rare group of Oscar winners: two different actors winning Oscars for playing the same character in two different films. Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro each won Oscars for portraying mob boss Vito Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, respectively. And now Phoenix and the late Heath Ledger are in that club for their respective turns as DC Comics’ Clown Prince of Crime. So what is it about the character of Joker that has made him so appealing to Oscar voters?
In The Dark Knight, Ledger’s Joker was the anarchist striking out of nowhere in order to undermine order and unleash havoc on society, which made his Clown Prince a particularly topical threat post-9/11. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, meanwhile, encapsulated the anxiety of an unhinged loner looking to vent their rage on a society they believe has rejected them, fears widely held in an era of frequent, random mass shootings. Thompson believes the character of Joker represents “something about what we are afraid of, the chaos threatening us out there,” elements that seemingly helped both Phoenix and Ledger’s respective portrayals resonate not just with audiences and critics but Academy members as well.
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The very range of the character himself – the myriad ways into his twisted psyche available to a performer – is likely another draw, allowing for varied and powerful interpretations by different actors. “The sky’s the limit in terms of what you can do with him. He’s been funny, mysterious, tragic, violent, scary and everything in between,” Davis explained. Rushfield concurred, finding him “a villain who is at once gleeful but wears his pain on his sleeve in a very dramatic way.” Rushfield said the role offers “lots of opportunity for some very big acting, and lots of ways to interpret the basic character for an actor.”
A captivating performance certainly helped propel Joker (and The Dark Knight before it) into serious Oscar consideration but what will it take for a comic book movie to finally win Best Picture? After all, both Joker and Black Panther transcended their pop culture trappings and, in very different ways, became part of the national conversation in their years of release. (And both films grossed over $1 billion worldwide, clearly pointing to their broader appeal beyond just the comic book fan demo.)
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So far, comic book movies have proven far more successful at the Oscars in the Best Animated Feature category, which has seen Marvel’s Big Hero 6 and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse go home winners. The next major live-action comic book movie that wants to compete in the Best Picture Oscar race has “got to work as a serious movie without being unrelentingly dark,” according to Rushfield. “And it’s got to have a story to tell. A story that’s got to be something more than ‘a studio felt that this was the next character that it wanted to make a movie about so hired a bunch of people to do that.’”
As with any film of any genre vying for Oscar glory, comic book movies have a high hurdle to clear if they want to be nominated, let alone win Hollywood’s highest honor. But, as Fandango’s Davis sees it, the chances for a film of this genre winning are increasing not decreasing. “Comic book films get closer to winning a Best Picture Oscar every year. What it will take is a story that resonates with a nation and the world, so much so that it transcends its genre,” Davis said. “Black Panther almost did it. Joker almost did it. One day it will happen, and we’re getting closer and closer to that day each year.”
Source: IGN.com Why Joker Was Never Going to Win Best Picture